I
recently attended an interview and it went quite well, that is until the woman
started asking me questions from my own chosen branch of engineering.
After
the customary ‘tell-me-about-yourself’ for which I had a well rehearsed
custom-built answer, I was starting to feel very much at ease with the
interviewer. But then she stumped me with a question about DC motors. After
almost four years of slugging it at the Electrical and Electronics Department,
I should’ve known the answer. I’ve never been ashamed of saying ‘I don’t know’
and so I went ahead and said it.
She
was not one to give up. She started helping me find the answer giving me clues
and all. I should’ve been relieved, even thankful that she had chose not to
lecture me or aggravate my deep-seated sense of inadequacy regarding my own
branch of study. Surprisingly, I felt offended that she would try to help me
find the answer… as if she was helping a blind man cross the road.
‘Ma’am…’,
I bit back condescension and cut her short, ‘I honestly don’t know the answer
to that question.’
‘Okaaay’,
she said.
‘Infact…
If you are planning to go down the road of DC or AC machines, I’m pretty sure
that I won’t be able to give a proper answer to any further questions.’
‘That’s
too honest an answer for a job interview.’, she was smiling ear to ear clearly
amused at the specimen sitting before her.
‘I
am a strong proponent of radical honesty.’, I countered with a grin to match
her smile.
‘But,
isn’t it a failure on your part that you don’t even know the basics of what
you’ve been studying four years..?’, now she was going below the belt.
From
there on it became like a therapy session and she had trapped me with that question.
‘Totally….
It’s my fault……. But um….. in my defence, we don’t have the best of teachers.’,
I managed a pathetic explanation. Then I started bitching about MGU, MACE and
Engineering in general and she was prompting me with ‘hmmm’ and ‘how do you feel
about that…?’
‘Where
does that leave you with regard to B.tech…?’, she asked me after sometime.
I
thought for a while and said, ‘I am fed up of what I thought I was supposed to
be doing… I am not very good at what I enjoy doing... And I hate people telling
me what I should be doing...’
She
flashed a sympathetic smile, extended her hand for a shake and said, ‘Well….
this was fun.’. I shook her hand(so soft…) with a perplexed expression as if
trying to say, ‘ Over already…?, I was just getting started’.
The
list of selected candidates came and sure enough I was not there on it. Bitch
please…. As if I needed your validation…(Read ‘Why didn’t you take me..? you
were so pretty and I liked you very much’)
